Quotes About Ambiguity

One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.

I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.

The Osage have this lovely phrase: 'Travelers in the Mist.' It was the term for part of an Osage clan that would take the lead whenever the tribe was venturing into unfamiliar realms. And, in a way, we are all travelers in the mist. The challenge is that, as writers, we sometimes want to ignore this murkiness, or we want to write around it.

It's impossible to make a living in the arts unless you make a fortune. There's almost no in-between. Writers are either broke or rolling in it. Oddly, you can't tell them apart.

I had a series of mini-breakdowns where the public persona - this thing, this face, this person who writes this music... I would walk past that person in the mirror or listen to that person playing guitar and I didn't know who they were.

I don't know if I'm a writer who plays poker or a poker player who writes.

I think it's an area that one writes from that is curious because it is not a clearly defined partisan one.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

It was hard to tell what her weapons were, except for that sort of inane good sense and emotional honesty.

If you're ever dragged from your chambers at midnight, blindfolded and gagged, without being told whether you're off to a firing squad or a surprise birthday party, you'll find that you turn and return to that pivotal moment.

Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all.

How many times in a life, he thought, will I lie down in a darkness whose character I cannot imagine, to see what daybreak reveals of my new circumstances? Or is that every day of my life?

It is existentially, hyperbolically, quintessentially unknowable.

It's true cats have nine lives, you know. But cats can't count. So I don't know where I am.

Our lives are in the space between Isaiah Berlin's "We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail an irreparable loss" and Borges's Garden of Forking Paths, where every choice produces a quantum explosion of alternate future.

What an awful thing life is, isn't it? It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

Doute. Pire que la négation.

It's Very difficult to put your Finger on exactly what 'nice' means and that's why a biscuit has been specially designed to help. The Nice biscuit has a layer of sugar on the top to make it seem sweet, but essentially it's very dull. The same can be said of nice people.

He did not know how to make her understand that he would be happy, most happy, to become her husband in his turn. He certainly could not tell her that, now, at this moment, in this place, in the presence of this corpse; nevertheless he could, he believed, find one of those ambiguous, acceptable, complicated statements whose words have hidden significance, and which can, by their calculated reservations, express everything you intend.

It is necessary to know how to slip the all-important matter, rather hinted at than said right out, in between the description of two fashionable entertainments, without appearing to intend it. It is necessary to imply a thing by judicious reservations; let what is desired be guessed at; contradict in such a fashion as to confirm, or affirm in such a way that no one shall believe the statement

Ja ta lisas nagu omaenese mõtte jätkuks: No näete nüüd, põle see elu ühti nii hea ega nii halb kui paistab.

The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was.

In his left hand he was holding aloft the German flag; with his right he was shaking hands in smiling effusion with a bald-headed man whose face looked like a pot of lard that has boiled over and eventually congealed in white, flabby, unhealthy drifts and folds.